clayton patterson

We only crop square and we ONLY use the Earlybird filter. (Left to right: Dunn, Freedman and Patterson)

It’s tough to out-talk Clayton Patterson, the Bloomberg-bashing photographer with the Santa beard who’s basically the Mayor of the LES. But Jill Freedman managed to do just that following a screening of Everybody Street last night at the Apple Store. The acclaimed photographer, whose black-and-white shots of cops, firemen, and street denizens (many of them from the ’70s and ’80s) appear in Cheryl Dunn‘s excellent new documentary about NYC street shooters, joined Patterson and Dunn in a panel discussion, and immediately stole the show by bitching about the bright stage lighting: “Does Apple sell sunglasses?” she winced.More →

If you missed Cheryl Dunn’s new documentary about New York City street photography when it played at Nitehawk last month, don’t worry: you can catch Everybody Street at the Apple Store in Soho for free. After the screening, Sunday at 7 p.m., there’ll be a q&a with Dunn and two of the 13 fellow photographers who are featured in the film: Lower East Side documentarian Clayton Patterson and Jill Freedman, best known for her black-and-white photos of gritty ’70s and ’80s NYC.

Reserve a spot here. Or if you can’t make it, rent or buy the film on Vimeo.

We were devastated — really just devastated — when Billy Leroy, star of Travel Channel’s Baggage Battles, told us he had ditched plans to return to the old spot on Houston Street where he sold subway signs, skulls, and sundries out of a tent. It’s not like we ever had room to keep a stuffed coyote in our apartment, and our taste in art doesn’t really tend toward blue demons — but everyone knows Billy’s Antiques & Props was one of the last holdovers from the days before “metro-suburbanites,” as Billy likes to call them, swarmed the Bowery in flip-flops. Which is why Jim Jarmusch showed up at the closing party.

Wednesday, that green tent will live again — on the big screen — as we present Dirty Old Town at the B+B Newsroom. (The event is free: just let us know you’re coming.) This fine work of cinema verité portrays Billy as an antiques dealer — and a “leader of fools and king of gypsies” — who has 72 hours to make the rent, or his landlord will turn his junk store into a Starbucks. All the while Billy has to resist the advances of a young party vixen played by Janell Shirtcliff (it’s hard out there for a props dealer) who also has her claws in a preppy restaurateur played by Paul Sevigny of Beatrice Inn. (Sevigny’s band A.R.E Weapons contributed an ode to gentrification, “Parking Lot,” to the soundtrack.) Maybe the best part: Scott Dillin, an ex-cop who actually patrolled the mean streets of the LES back in the bad old days, plays a hard-drinking, wrong-thinking boy in blue.

Are you starting to see why Abel Ferrara presented Dirty Old Town when it premiered in Manhattan? Take it from the man himself: “This film is fucking real.”

So join us Wednesday at 155 Grand Street, off of Bedford Ave., in Williamsburg as we screen this insta-classic and then talk to the film’s star, Billy Leroy, as well as the filmmakers, Jenner Furst, Daniel B. Levin and Julia Willoughby Nason. Furst and Levin will also be taking questions about Captured, their documentary about LES photographer Clayton Patterson (who also has a part in Dirty Old Town). Stop in and have a Stumptown stubbie on us.

“I’m a fire dancer,” said Susannah Pryce, who was lurking about the front stairs of the Sixth Street Community Center on Saturday night, dressed as the Goddess of Death. For her role as a macabre guide to the finale of the 13 Portals, she wore glowing face paint, a black cloak, and six-inch fingernails made of curling brown beans. After explaining how she regularly performs at bars with an on-fire instrument that looks like “the bones of a giant geisha fan,” Pryce told us: “Tonight’s portal is about rebirth. And that’s why I’m here. Because everybody has to die to be reborn.”More →

A slew of East Villagers — including poet Bob Holman and Times writer Colin Moynihan — shuffled into Anthology Film Archives last night to watch Clayton Patterson’s 3.5 hours of footage of the Tompkins Square Police riot, on its 25th anniversary.More →

So, yeah. Max Fish closed last night with an epic sendoff. Yesterday photographer Daniel Savage shared his photos of the bar’s regulars and last night, our own Taji Ameen stopped in (or tried to, anyway) to hang with them. He brought back the video above and the report below.More →

Southerners have their Civil War reenactments but what do East Villagers have when it comes to reliving their defining battle? Just the annual Tompkins Square Park Riot reunion shows. But this year, on the 25th anniversary of that tumultuous night when cops went gonzo on a group protesting the park curfew (resulting in over 100 complaints of brutality), they’re getting much, much more.More →

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About B + B

Bedford + Bowery is where downtown Manhattan and north Brooklyn intersect. Produced by NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in collaboration with New York magazine, B + B covers the East Village, Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and beyond. Want to contribute? Send a tip? E-mail the editor.